NUSD has barely moved from $0.998 even after Neutrl paused minting, redemptions, and other protocol functions for more than a day. According to BlockTempo’s review of Ethereum on-chain records, the stable price does not reflect active market support. The report says the token’s main Curve pool was first drained and then effectively frozen through contract permissions, leaving little room for trading to push the peg away from its quoted level.
Curve liquidity was removed before the public pause notice
BlockTempo said NUSD’s primary liquidity venue was a single NUSD/USDC pool on Curve at address 0x7E19…3b09.
At 7:12 p.m. Taipei time on Aug. 13, 1,578,976 USDC and 1,933,079 NUSD were withdrawn from that pool in one move. The combined value was about $3.51 million, which the report described as nearly the entire pool.
Ninety-six seconds later, at 7:13:59 p.m. the same evening, address 0xDE72…1504 sent an addToDenylist transaction to the NUSD contract. The parameter in that transaction was the same Curve pool address. Neutrl’s official pause announcement came more than 10 minutes after those on-chain actions.
In the announcement, Neutrl wrote: 「Neutrl has temporarily paused minting, redemptions, and other protocol functions following circumstances affecting protocol reserves. These measures have been taken in the interest of our users, after advice from legal counsel, to preserve an orderly process while the impact is…」
Denylisting the pool shut down transfers and swaps
BlockTempo said it queried the pool address through the NUSD contract’s isDenylisted function using a public node and received a true result, confirming the address remained on the list at the time of writing. The report added that the contract includes permissioned functions such as addToDenylist, removeFromDenylist, and DENYLIST_MANAGER_ROLE.
For any address placed on the denylist, token transfers in and out are blocked by the contract. In the case of an automated market maker pool, that means deposits, withdrawals, and swaps all stop working. Once the Curve pool was denylisted, market participants could no longer use it to trade NUSD in the normal way.
By publication time, the pool held only about 14,876 NUSD and 12,151 USDC, for a combined value of roughly $27,000, the report said.
Why NUSD did not depeg
DefiLlama data cited by BlockTempo showed NUSD at about $0.9983 with circulating supply near $53.3 million. The report’s conclusion was straightforward: the token stayed near $0.998 not because trading kept it there, but because the only main Curve liquidity pool had first lost about $3.51 million in liquidity and was then denylisted, disabling inflows, outflows, and swaps. With trading effectively halted, the quoted price had little chance to move.
The dispute centers on how the blacklist was used
BlockTempo noted that blacklist functions are not unusual in stablecoins. USDT and USDC can both freeze addresses, typically to comply with law enforcement requests or block stolen funds.
What made this case contentious, the report said, was not the existence of a blacklist feature itself. The issue was that Neutrl applied it to its own liquidity pool, and did so immediately after removing nearly all liquidity from that pool.
BlockTempo had previously reported that Neutrl paused protocol functions because reserves were affected by unspecified circumstances, and that other operations were halted following legal advice. The move also led structured yield protocol Strata to pause related markets. As of publication, Neutrl had not publicly explained either the liquidity withdrawal or the decision to place the pool address on the denylist.